German Greens pay price of success

Date: 18/03/1999

By Tim Jones

GERMANY'S Greens are learning the hard way that their greatest political triumph may well spell the beginning of their demise.

On the face of it, only 17 years since this iconoclastic bunch of late-Sixties rebels first got themselves voted into the Bundestag, things could hardly be better for the Greens. As foreign minister, Joschka Fischer can bring some long-awaited ethics to Germany's external policy and - even better - Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin can export German 'greenery' to the rest of Europe.

But that is precisely the problem. Nearly two decades of environmentalist pressure on the Christian Democrat/Free Democrat governments at federal level and Social Democrats in the Länder have made Germany one of the greenest places in the EU.

The party's fundamentalist rump, represented by joint chairperson Antje Radcke, parlia-mentary group co-chairperson Kerstin Müller and, on his nostalgic days, by Trittin himself, still believe they have a lot to do. Fischer and his realo allies do not.

In the chancellery sits a man who was forced to do business with the Greens to form a majority last autumn, but who now feels that his authority is being undermined by Trittin and friends.

The first big spat within the cabinet was between Trittin, Schröder and Economics Minister Werner Müller over the taxation of energy use.

The Green minister wanted to deliver as much as he could of his party's plans to triple petrol prices over the next decade. Müller, a former manager at Energiewirtschaft Veba and a chancellery intimate, disagreed. As a result, the energy tax was made less ambitious and a series of industrial exemptions filled it with holes.

This was as nothing compared to the row which engulfed the coalition in December when Trittin decided to deliver on the government's commitment to phase out nuclear power reprocessing. His plan to end contracts with British and French firms brought loud protests and the threat of massive damages claims against Bonn.

The upshot was a calamitous electoral defeat in the former Green stronghold of Hesse and the consequent loss of Schröder's majority in the federal upper house. Judging by recent events, his bid to frighten the Greens back into line by talking to the free-market FDP seems to be working.